News

Magick 2.0, the first full releast of the Magick II series has finally been released. Changes from the last release candidate are, as you would expect, minor. This marks the beginning of active development of Magick 2.1.

All updates to Magick 2.0 will be released in the form of patches (and appropriate releases). The code has been branched, and will be maintained separately from Magick 2.1, however Magick 2.0 is and will be actively supported.

The development team would like to thank everyone who helped us get here, and hope you will all continue to help us as we start with Magick 2.1. Magick 2.1 will see another 2 developers become active, and has a much shorter release cycle time than 2.0 had.

You can look at some of the major goals for Magick 2.1, by checking out the project specifications that have been written for it. A new page will be started shortly that will host all language packs submitted for Magick 2.0, so please, by all means, submit them!

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The third release candidated for Magick II has been released. The major change with this release is we have re-written the DB conversion routines, and now can convert many more foreign databases to Magick.

Because of this, we would like anyone using a non-Magick set of services, either try to convert them with magick, or submit them to us so we can attempt to do so. This is the only way we will be able to fix any glitches that may be in the conversion routines.

Also in this release, we have expanded the --service command (Win NT/2k/XP). You can now do things such as add dependancies to the magick service (ie. make Magick wait for the ircd to start first), change the user magick runs as, etc.

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The second release candidate for Magick II has been released. This release candidate fixes primarily protocol issues with Hybrid 7 and ircu, and some other minor issues.

Please help test this for us, so we can get it out the door, and get to work on Magick 2.1. As always, if anyone wants to translate the language files, feel free.

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The first release candidate has been created for Magick II. This is a landmark step, as it means we are confident enough in Magick to actually release it. I encourage anyone using or looking into Magick to use this version.

Over the next few weeks, we will be specifically concentrating on making the installation of Magick better, improving the documentation as best we can and other such usability issues, as well as any bugs that may come in. We encourage people to submit bug reports now more than ever, we'd like this to be as bug free a release as we can!

We are also putting out the call more than ever for multi-linguists to translate the magick language files into other languages. We'd like to release 2.0 with a nice list of languages already supported. If you're interested in translating magick's language files, please email prez@neuromancy.net.

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For those interested, the Magick Development Team has released some of the specifications for Magick 2.1 (which will be the next project after Magick 2.0 makes it out of beta, eventually). Some very interesting and fascinating things coming in the next version!

You can check out these specs at: http://www.neuromancy.net/magick/devel/spec_index.html. Of course, if you use CVS, they are also in Magick-II/docs/devel. Comments and feedback is, of course, welcome.

Remember however, these specs can and will change before (and during) Magick 2.1 development. Also remember these specs are not EVERYTHING that will be worked on in Magick 2.1, just the 'big hitters', the major features, there will still be lots of smaller incremental stuff.

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Well, its been a long time since I've updated the news on the main Magick site (however the project site has been keeping fairly up to date with newest progressions for Magick II. So heres a summary of whats been going on.

We are now putting out a call for bi-linguists to come forward, and help Magick out! Magick II has full multi-language support, however the only language that has a full translation is English. We have the beginnings of French, Portutuese, Swedish and French, however they are not really maintained. If you read and write two (or more) languages (one of them being english), why not join the translators mailing list and help make Magick a truely international product!

Magick II has been re-licensed under the Artisic License v2.0 or better (you will notice there is now a 'License' button on the menu bar, this has the full text of this license). The Artistic License v2.0 one of the licenses perl version 6 will be released under when its released. It is more liberal than the GPL, but remains GPL compatible.

We have also now built a full Java configuration GUI for Magick II, so no longer do you have to edit a .ini file manually, now you can use the GUI provided. You can use this GUI both in a web browser (you can use it right here on the Magick site by clicking the Config Tool menu item), or you can run it standalone. Many people have reported this is a much nicer way to configure Magick.

Magick II has been building up steem lately, due to the fact that the Development Team has been releasing reasonably regular Magick II windows pre-compiled binaries (that install very easily). The most popular configuration right now is Windows connecting to Unreal 3.2beta10. Thanks to all those admins out there willing to help Magick by beta testing it!

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We finally have our CVS server back online! We have setup two new methods for you to always have the 'bleeding edge' version of Magick if thats your thing.

First, we have setup weekly snapshots that you can download for the latest version. No guarantee of these builds actually working, as this is just what happens to be in the archive at the time the snapshot is made.

Also, we have enabled read-only CVS access for those who want to just checkout the new stuff. To use this, you must set your CVSROOT to:

:pserver:anonymous@cvs.neuromancy.net:/home/cvs/magick

No password is required. Once you have logged in (as anonymous), you may checkout the following modules:

• Magick-I - The Magick 1.x source tree, this is not being maintained by any current Magick developers, so this will not change much, if at all.
• Magick-II - The Magick 2.x source tree, this is the current version of Magick being maintained and developed. This is the tree all snapshots (mentioned above) are made from.
• Support - This is where any support utilitity required to use/compile Magick is located (usually just tar.gz files).
• Patches - Third party (and some of our own) patches for Magick, all versions.

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We are also looking for people out there to give us shells on various UNIX platforms for the sole purpose of compiling Magick II. For doing so, you WILL get your name in the credits, and included with the binary distribution of Magick II for that platform/architecture when it is released. Right now we have successfully compiled and run Magick on the following platforms (if yours is not listed and you can offer a shell for compilation ONLY, please email prez@neuromancy.net):

(1) To compile on FreeBSD 3.4, you need the pthreads patch for libc, or any FreeBSD build done after March 2nd 2000.

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Magick II has finally been released in BETA stage!
To compile it you will need:

• All Platforms

  • The ACE library (compiled with threads!).

  • The ZLIB library (most unix's have it already).

• UNIX

  • GCC v2.95 or above (NOT v2.96).

  • A threads library (pthreads is good!)

• Windows 95/98/NT/2000

  • MS Visual C++ v6.0 or Borland C++ Builder v4.0

If you wish to test Magick II, please download it from the downloads section and sign up for the BETA team mailing list.

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Magick II has been released in ALPHA stage!

If you wish to test Magick II, please download it from the downloads section and sign up for the ALPHA team mailing list. Only scase installation instructions are in the docs/INSTALL file, so you will need to know a fair bit about compiling stuff.

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